SONG OF SCHEHERAZADE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 423, 1 August 1947, Page 24

SONG OF SCHEHERAZADE

(Universal)

| AST week it was the great Mr. Handel. This week it is Nicholas Andreevich Rimsky-Kor-sakov. Pretty soon it will be Paganini. The film in-

dustry seems determined that our knowledge of the masters shall be wide if not deep, and the effort to absorb all this musical education becomes a trifle exhausting — especially when, as happened in this case, one had seen Mr. Warwick Braithwaite conducting the National Orchestra through the Schc~w herazade Suite just the night before one" came across Jean Pierre Aumont, in the role of the composer himself, trying do the self-same thing on the screen. M. Aumont’s effort, as it happens, is a poor second-best; just a portion of the Suite here, just a fragment there; which is a pity because the genuine Scheherazade ballet, if staged in full and in

colour, would have been many times better to watch and listen to than much of the present contents of this film. All the same, when it comes to composing, M. Aumont doesn’t do so badly. As Rimsky-Korsakov he displays an industry little short of prodigious. Arriving for a brief shore-leave at a Moroccan port (he’s @ midshipman on a Czarist training-ship), he puts the finishing touches to Song of India and Hymn to the Sun; that night, under the influence _ & Miss Yvonne de Carlo’s dancing in #> ow dive, he casually scribbles the Scheherazade music on the back of a few prints torn from the walls; the next morning he sets to work on his Capriccio Espagnole and finishes it in time for it to be rehearsed by Miss Carlo and performed with full orchestra and ballet t a party that night; the following day tosses off a mere trifle and proceeds ¥ to play it on the fiddle, whereupon Miss de Carlo, with extraordinary prescience, remarks that it sounds just like the flight of a bumblebee. In between these bouts of creative activity, the musical sailor-boy still finds time and energy to fight a duel with whips, to make love to Miss de Carlo, smuggle her aboard the ship disguised, iii@equately, as a boy, and run foul of his captain. He is last seen conducting the Imperial Orchestra and Ballet in St. Petersburg, with Miss de Carlo as premiere danseuse, in what passes for a performance of Scheherazade. Since the film claims merely to have been "inspired by the music of RimskyKorsakov," none of these absurdities need be taken too seriously, Fortunately, nobody connected with the production appears to have done so, least of all Brian Donlevy as the captain, a chainsmoking disciplinarian with a queer sense of humour, and Eve Arden as Miss de Carlo’s scatty mother. They exhibit most conspicuously the light-hearted approach to the subject-matter, amounting almost to parody or burlesque, ‘which saves the film from being regrettable nonsense and makes it simply nonsense.